Sunday 3/16/14 Show: Village Vanguard’s Deborah Gordon

The next show will air on Sunday, March 16th, 2013 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. During this installment, Suga’ in My Bowl covers the third of four women in different areas of this music during its four weeks of broadcasting in Women’s History Month. This week’s guest is Deborah Gordon, Village Vanguard owner and daughter of Lorraine and Max Gordon.

For almost 80 years, the Village Vanguard has swung in 4/4 time, marking the center of the known jazz universe to an international circle of musicians and music fans. To the uninitiated, the small club at the bottom of 15 well-trodden steps below street level may seem little more than a cramped, triangular-shaped room. But to a hip populace it’s where the ghosts of past jazz giants still play, where the best living jazz talent aspire to record, and where sound waves seem to reverberate in a manner unlike any other club, anywhere.

Max Gordon first opened the Vanguard in 1935 as a variety venue presenting sketch comedy, poetry and dinner. Since then, the club’s tradition of left-leaning politics and irreverence — Yiddish poets in the ’30s, absurdists like Professor Irwin Corey in the ’50s — is reflected in the progressive jazz it still presents.